Corbyn might win office, but he’ll struggle to win power

The vote of no confidence in Dominic Grieve shows the Tories are, like Labour, vulnerable to bolshiness in their own local associations. In fact, the Conservatives might turn out to be more effective at purging MPs because, for all of the noise, the Corbynites have not done much. And if Jeremy Corbyn ends up in No10 after a snap general election, he may soon wish that he had done more. Two polls in the past 24 hours have been pretty good for Labour. Opinium has them level-pegging with the Tories on 35 per cent while Delta gives them a five-point lead (though this falls to three points when respondents are given the option of Change UK). On these polls, Labour would form the largest party in the Commons – but it would not have a majority. In which case, Corbyn could expected to be hemmed in by his rebels to a far greater extent than Theresa May is being constrained by the ERG. The Corbyn project has three stages: 1) Change the Labour Party. 2) Form a government, preferably a majority Labour one. 3) Change the country for generations to come in the way Attlee and Thatcher did. The first stage has been completed in record time. It took a decade to transform Labour from a Clause Four socialist party into a metropolitan centre-left one but the Corbynistas have embedded progressive populism in a third of the time. The leadership, institutions, membership and activist base are solidly committed to Corbyn and Corbynism, even if the latter is still poorly defined. The second stage, winning power, won’t be as easy. If we are on the brink of a trend back to Labour in the opinion polls, Corbyn might end up leading the largest single party (and might soon be odds-on to do so). Labour could then govern as a minority administration, perhaps with supply and confidence from the Scottish Nationalists.